Recently I bought a copy of Farber on Film, and I’ve been flipping through it, sporadically reading here and there; last week I happened across his famous piece on Sunset Boulevard (1950). These lines and observations are fairly well-known, but they still hold up to re-reading. Check it out:
The story … amounts to a morbid liaison between the “talkie” and silent film world, with Swanson doing a lot of ear-bending with a voice like a hollow stone wall, while Holden does an unemphatic version of the best silent-film pantomime. The tragedy inherent in his gigolo setup with the ex-star is largely muffed because the Brackett-Wilder combination — vague about the sunset period of an actress’s life — entwines Holden with a cliche of the frustrated middle-aged artiste and drenches them both in gimmicks and weird atmosphere.
And another fantastic passage:
The cold, mean Sunset Boulevard — a beautiful title, though I suspect it was shot on another boulevard — is further proof of the resurgence of art in the Hollywood of super-craftsmen with insuperable taste. American film makers have suddenly learned how to make movies work as plastically as Mondrian paintings, using bizarre means and gaucherie, with an eye always on the abstract vitality produced by changing pace, working a choppy sentence against a serene image, extravagant acting against quiet. In this gimmick-ridden Sunset a corpse talks. The improbability bothers me less than the fact that he over-talks, explaining action … that explains itself with a morbid realism about American scene.
Possibly my favorite lines:
The movie is stultified by spectacle, novelistic development, and a slow dismemberment of the human beings that are strictly from Von Stroheim’s day. It is hard to find any logic or life in Swanson’s grotesque because the director is too busy building baroque furniture for both her and her ménage. The illogicality of her mausoleum-like mansion, moldering outside while one butler keeps the inside jungle of rococo spotless, is less stultifying than the eclectic worship of forebodingly cluttered shots and dated insights about contaminated life.
After reading all this, of course I had to pick up Sunset Boulevard at the library. I guess I’ll watch it again mid-week.
